I read an article today that Realtor.org put out talking about the 6 best practices of online leads. The author is a great guy and knows his stuff. However, he misses the boat on this one.

He spends a good amount of time discussing how important it is not to call your leads. This is completely wrong. As most of you know my Internet program through either 100MPH Marketing or my eHomes Realty Network, the reality is if you are not calling your leads which supply a phone number, you are letting buyers and sellers slip through your fingers.

The worst thing you can do is not make use of the information you are given to help your customers buy their home.

Of the over 20,000 people we have in our database, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times a person who supplied their phone number to us that was upset when we called.

In fact this is what we normally hear: “You are the first Realtor to actually follow up with us.” They are very excited and happy to talk about their real estate needs!

When I first started figuring out Internet leads back in 2002, I didn’t make phone calls. I only corresponded with people that contacted me. My first year of Internet Marketing I sold over 50 homes, but more importantly I lost more than 50 sales by not making phone calls. Continue reading this post

Mitch Ribak of Tropical Realty (a HomeGain Advisor and a contributor on this blog) is the special guest on HomeGain Radio.

Mitch gives advice to real estate agents and brokers for how to get leads, especially via the Internet, and how to convert a higher volume of leads into clients.

Listen to Mitch’s advice for real estate agents:

During the call, Mitch mentions how HomeGain’s marketing program, BuyerLink has helped deliver more consumer traffic to his website and boost his business.

To hear more HomeGain Radio interviews, plus find real estate articles, survey results and more, visit our Media Center!

Mitch Ribak is the Broker/Owner of The Mitch Ribak Real Estate Team, Tropical Realty of Suntree.

Continue reading this post

Leads are the lifeblood for an agent. Without leads it really doesn’t matter what else you do well. If you have no leads you have no one to convert to a client and therefore no one to follow up with and no sales to close.

I think a successful REALTOR® will have more than one avenue in his lead generation model. If one method fails or slows he/she will have other ways to keep his business successful.

Consistency is one of the main keys in a successful Real Estate practice. I think you have to pick about 3 lead generation tools—a 3-legged stool if you will –- that will keep your pipeline full.

The three we use are as follows:

1) Internet—Surprise!

We use a combination of our own websites and the HomeGain system. Our own sites include one devoted specifically to Fort Benning, Georgia, Real Estate as well as one devoted to Columbus Georgia Real Estate and rank well on their own merit. Continue reading this post

So most of you know by now that I am all about leads. I can talk with the best of them about lead conversion, lead capture and basically anything lead based.

Today I want to talk to you about the human part of what we do. You can drive a million people to your site and get 10,000 leads, but if you don’t understand the human aspect of what we do as Real Estate professionals, this is all for not.

To me, and my staff, leads are a God send. We are constantly working and currently our Florida office is averaging 130+ different customers per month and we just grew to our final number of 22 agents.

Even though the market is tough right now, we are still selling 15-25 homes per month. Not very stellar for the amount of people we are showing, but if you understand our Florida market the past couple of years, you would think that is great!

If it weren’t for leads, my company would have been gone a long time ago, which has been the fate of about 20% of our Realtors and many Brokerages.

So you have a lead, what happens then? I’m not going to talk about your drip campaign or for that fact anything computer or tech related…except maybe having a good CRM system to insure your great follow up.

Firstly, if you are not picking up the phone and calling your new customer within 24 hours, preferably within a few hours, then you are wasting money.

Continue reading this post

Max the HomeGain gorilla arrived by mail over the weekend and we had a long discussion about lead management.

He carried on and on about orange being consumers’ favorite color, even tried to talk me into using an orange font color to write this, but one thing he said that really hit home is that consumers don’t like to be pushed.

It might seem odd that a gorilla is concerned about pushing, but he has a point.
I don’t like to be pushed.

From what I’ve learned about “systems” if you push the system to get what you want, the system pushes back, until you find the right leverage to get results. In this case, if an agent pushes his lead management system to get immediate results, the system pushes back.

Leads are set up to receive information and then, in their own time, act on that information and hopefully use your services. I believe consumers look at a company like HomeGain as Continue reading this post

Max the HomeGain gorilla arrived by mail over the weekend and we had a long discussion about lead management.

He carried on and on about orange being consumers’ favorite color, even tried to talk me into using an orange font color to write this, but one thing he said that really hit home is that consumers don’t like to be pushed.

It might seem odd that a gorilla is concerned about pushing, but he has a point.
I don’t like to be pushed.

From what I’ve learned about “systems” if you push the system to get what you want, the system pushes back, until you find the right leverage to get results. In this case, if an agent pushes his lead management system to get immediate results, the system pushes back.

Leads are set up to receive information and then, in their own time, act on that information and hopefully use your services. I believe consumers look at a company like HomeGain as Continue reading this post